vengeance is a dish best served cold
by danickzta
Summary: The meeting with the grounders didn't go quite as planned. Now they're torturing Clarke, and hell hath no fury like Bellamy scorned. Set during the events of a slightly AU {1.09}.


**/1/****vengeance is a dish best served cold.**

_The meeting with the grounders didn't go quite as planned. Now they're torturing Clarke, and hell hath no fury like Bellamy scorned. Set during the events of a slightly AU {1.09}._

this idea came about as a mix of "Clarke's the only medic, what if she got injured" and "what if the grounders wanted revenge" (and bellarke of course, what do you take me for) and then it kind of took a dark turn and morphed into something that i can most definitely say is the angstiest thing to have ever graced my keyboard.

_disclaimer:__ i_ have no affiliation with the CW's _The 100_, and if i did, i'm pretty sure i would've already been fired on grounds of unnecessarily excessive character angst. also, i swear i'm not a terrible human being. pinky-swear it.

* * *

As he broke out of his stupor, filmy gauze peeled back like a curtain, the first thing Bellamy noticed was the smell, musty and yet somehow fresh, a strange combination he had come to associate with Earth. Fitting, seeing as it was populated by both a host of new, strangely wonderful experiences and bands of roaming savages. He breathed in the scent, savoring it, letting it clear his hazy mind, and opened his eyes.

And he could've kicked himself because the first thing he noticed should certainly _not _have been the smell. Much more relevant were the stone walls and ceiling (dirt and crumbling wood) that boxed him in, a rickety staircase leading up and out, the only source of light in the dim room. Or the fact that he couldn't move his arms or legs. That probably came first. He was strapped down to a chair and Bellamy was almost 99.6% positive that that was not where he had begun the day.

He whipped his head from side to side, up and down, and he caught sight of a shock of blonde that stopped his confusion dead in its tracks.

_Clarke__._

She was lying in a heap on the floor, and the axe strapped to her thigh brought everything back in a rush of clarity that winded him as well as any blow to the head could've.

_Finn's meeting with the grounders. Clarke offering to step up as representative of their people. His own, goddamn ego and refusal to relinquish the mantle. The leader of the grounders holding a knife to her throat. The crunch of twigs underfoot behind him. And then, nothing._

And that could only mean one thing: they had been taken. He struggled against the ropes that bound his wrists with renewed effort, succeeding only in straining a muscle and chafing skin. He growled in frustration, ready to hurl a less-than-complimentary name at the wall across from him, but then he realized that Clarke hadn't been restrained (which he admitted was a little suspect, but who was he to question when the universe decided to give you lemons?). "Clarke. Clarke! Wake up!"

At first, she barely stirred, but soon she was groaning and leveraging her arms beneath her, picking herself up out of the dirt. She turned to Bellamy and narrowed her eyes. "Bellamy? What's-?"

And then Clarke's eyes widened and Bellamy heard a voice like icy fingers creeping down the back of his neck, trepidation gripping him in its fetid claws. "Good. You're both up."

Through his growing unease, he tried to place the cadence of the voice, the way it seemed both monotone and yet ripe with intimidation at the same time. But he could only focus on the way Clarke went stiff all over before a woman stepped out from behind him and recognition reared its head: the grounders' leader.

Stringy brown hair, clad in a simple, unassuming tunic and white markings, expression placid, she didn't seem like much. But Bellamy remembered the way her knife against Clarke had drawn blood, the way she had smiled as something clubbed him in the back of the skull.

For a moment, he only stared at the woman, speechless. But then a man covered in furs and tattoos and a menacing amount of girth emerged from the shadows near the stairs, and Bellamy didn't have time to shout a warning before he seized Clarke by the elbows and pulled her toward him.

Clarke recoiled immediately. "Let go! Let go of me you motherf-!" The grounder restraining her silenced her with a vicious slap to the face, the force of which knocked her to the dirt. When she lurched forward through her daze and grabbed for the axe at his belt, he delivered a savage kick to her ribcage. She curled in on herself, wheezing for air, and in between her pants, Bellamy could make out one single, whispered word that hollowed him, focused his existence on the swath of blonde hair and crumbling resolve huddled on the floor in front of him: his name.

He saw red. Strained against the rope that fettered him to his chair. Tried his damndest to break free and show their captors that you didn't just fuck with Clarke and get away with it. His voice started out quiet, quivering in spite of itself, and then charged ahead and filled itself with rage and unspoken promises of violence. "No… no. No! Don't you touch her!" But his threats held all the weight of Clarke's whispered plea.

The grounder yanked her up by her hair and dragged her to the center of the room. She dug her heels into the dirt, clawed at his fists, hurled obscenities, but her attempts at escape seemed feeble in the face of her swimming vision and the grounder's air of dangerous nonchalance. He seized one wrist, and then the other, binding them tightly in a loop of coarse rope and dangling them from the ceiling, pulling it taught until her boots barely touched the ground. He unhooked his belt from around his waist, and Bellamy saw with a growing sense of dread that it wasn't just a belt: it was a whip, hewn together out of rough leather and twine.

He distantly wondered who else had had the misfortune of coming to the same realization, but then Clarke stopped thrashing and kicking and began to talk. Her voice was steady, serious, betraying almost none of her fear, and Bellamy almost would've believed she was calm if he didn't know her any better, the way her eyes flicked back and forth, up and down when she was anxious.

"You don't have to do this- we don't mean you any harm. If you just give us a chance we can tell you who we are, where we came from. We just want peace..!"

The grounders' leader ignored her and turned to Bellamy. "You torture one of ours, we torture one of yours. An eye-for-an-eye. We will show you what happens to those who don't understand how things work here. As leader to your people, it is paramount that you understand the consequences of your actions." She turned to the man, who had positioned himself behind Clarke, and said simply, "Begin."

Bellamy felt his stomach drop somewhere between his knees as his eyes desperately sought Clarke's, and when he found them, he wished that he hadn't been so damn arrogant, that he had let her step up as leader of their people instead. Maybe then she'd be in his shoes, and he in hers.

The whip arced down, and for one furtive moment, her eyes clouded over with a flash of panic before they were replaced with something much worse: pain. Her eyes rolled back in searing hot agony, but she ground her teeth together and held herself still in a show of defiance, and Bellamy was absurdly proud of her for a second before he saw the grounder let loose another strike. He hit her again and again and with every stroke he could see Clarke's resilience, her determination, uncoiling and slithering away from her inch-by-inch. Her winces grew louder and louder and the red on the whip, darker and darker, until something snapped and she was screaming and shrinking away as far as her bonds would let her.

Bellamy felt Clarke's pain as a living thing, and his own soon entwined with hers. He shot a venomous glare at the grounders' leader, stoically observing the crying, shaking girl as if she were no more than a sack of meat waiting to be flayed, and snarled at her in a fit of rage and loathing. She regarded him callously, her eyes unblinking as if to say, "See what happens when you defy me?" Bellamy was hurling indecipherable strings of profanities and delirious pleas and he was aware that they were falling on deaf ears but, _damn it_, Clarke was in pain and helpless and if there was one thing Bellamy knew about her, it was that she _hated_ showing weakness.

Her abuser switched arms and struck again, and then Clarke was wailing, _wailing_, and Bellamy had never heard anything so horrible before. It was all he could hear, sharpened into a dagger and piercing him down to his very core, assaulting him on all sides, and it was all he could do to not start wailing himself.

The lash came down again, jerking Clarke forward, the aftershock as she writhed in her bonds. This time, her legs gave way from under her, and she slumped, supported by no more than the ropes that encircled her bloodied wrists, rubbed raw and chafing.

Bellamy thought that surely, _surely_, this would be the end of it; they would see that Clarke could handle no more, that they had broken her resolve (his and hers, both), that this was some dark, perverse side of humanity that should never, ever, be allowed to surface again. But they didn't.

The man lifted his arm again and let it fly, the whip coiling around Clarke's torso, ripping her shirt (_that_ shirt that she had worn when she had told him he wasn't a monster, that she _needed_ him) and leaving a welt of fresh blood in its wake. This time she only exhaled sharply, her voice lost to her torment.

"Stop- Stop it..! Please! I'm begging you… please, stop…" he choked out, his voice stumbling and catching on his words. "I understand now; I'll do whatever you want. Just stop it…" Bellamy was trembling, eyes flicking back and forth between Clarke and the man, imploring him, bowing his head in supplication, all notions of pride and bravado thrown out the window. His voice cracked and wetness filled his eyes, his rage replaced with an all-consuming fear for the girl hanging in front of him.

She was just so still. And Clarke was never still. She was always ordering someone around, arguing with him, solving someone else's problems but never her own. Whether he wanted to admit it or not, whenever she stepped into a room, it was like she was all anyone could see, an implacable force of nature surrounded by walls of resolve and compassion and a hope that he just didn't have the luxury to afford. He silently prayed to whoever would listen that she would get through this undamaged and whole and optimistic again, and he felt ridiculous, but _damn it_, all he cared about was Clarke and the soft whimpers that were making her chest rise and fall.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the grounder's leader gesture something, and the man who was hurting Clarke—_hurting_ Clarke—stopped. He brought the whip up and licked it—actually _licked_ it, as if this was some sort of sick parody of those Grade B horror movies Octavia had always asked him to smuggle in—and dropped it at his feet. He dug his fingers into Clarke's back, which Bellamy was trying to imagine wasn't covered in bruises and blood and crisscrossing wounds, and sneered when she moaned.

"I heard one of your men thought we looked scarier with our face paint. Maybe you will too." And he smeared Clarke's blood over Bellamy's face. Bellamy gagged as bile rose in his throat.

"Enough, Raffe." The grounders' leader raised a hand, and Raffe retreated backwards, wiping the rest of Clarke's blood on his pant leg and running his hand through the ends of her hanging hair as he passed.

Before Bellamy could react, the leader approached him, bent low and whispered in his ear, her words dripping with condescension, "Hopefully you learned something today; if you value your life or the lives of your people at all, you will acquiesce when we want something. You will leave us to our devices. When we ask you to jump, you will say, 'How high?' Do you understand, boy?"

Bellamy glanced at Clarke, face covered in bruises and a thick sheen of sweat, hair matted with dirt and spatters of blood, and had to bite back a retort about how all he understood was how badly he wanted to tear the woman limb-from-limb and make her suffer just as badly. When he didn't answer, the woman grabbed his chin between thumb and forefinger and jerked it up. "I asked you a question, boy."

He met her glare with his own and snarled, "I understand."

The woman flicked his face aside as if it disgusted her to have touched it and stalked away. Halfway up the cellar's stairs, she called over her shoulder, "Better clean and dress those wounds. If she doesn't die from blood loss or shock, the infection will get her." And then she was gone.

Raffe soon took her place and slowly, mockingly, furled the whip back around his waist. "You're lucky I'm not in charge. I take even less kindly to smug, little interlopers like you. And I can think of a few different ways this could've ended." He leisurely raked his gaze over the length of Clarke's battered body, in a decidedly vile way that sent chills down Bellamy's spine and renewed his hatred of this man and all the visions of what he would do to him when he got free.

Raffe slid a finger down her cheek, and he smirked when she didn't recoil in disgust, as if she hadn't just been beaten past the point of consciousness. "Till' we meet again." He unlatched a knife from his boot and kicked it over toward Bellamy's feet. And then he was gone too.

For a second that stretched into the silence (the kind of silence that accompanied complete and utter despair, that followed when you returned to your tiny little home, empty and silent and yet somehow filled with echoes of your mother's screams as she floated, or your sister's cries as she looked at you in disappointment), for that second, Bellamy just sat there, frozen: in his anger, in his grief, in his guilt, he didn't know what. Clarke was in pain, most definitely terrified and disoriented, and it was _his_ fault. _He _was the one who had brought the grounder back to camp. _He_ was the one who had tortured him. _He_ was the one who had been too weak to finish the job and eliminate any possibility of retaliation. And they _had_ retaliated, in the worst way possible. He couldn't stomach what he had done any more than he could stomach the sight of the brutalized girl in front of him.

But Clarke needed him. He choked back what he tried to pretend wasn't a sob (he had to be brave for Clarke, he _had_ to) and broke himself out of his reverie, eying the knife on the floor. He rocked back and forth on the heel of the chair until it crashed on its side, and even though his face smashed into the ground and he could feel wetness trickling off of his nose, he twisted and turned until he palmed its handle. Fingers slick with sweat and concentration running in haphazard circles, he fumbled with it until he liberated his hands and sliced through the knots at his ankles.

In a daze, he stumbled over to Clarke but stopped short of touching her. Hand hovering in the loaded space between them, afraid that if he reached out, she might shatter into a thousand tiny shards, each one more fragile than the next. But then he saw the blood pooling from the gash in her shirt, and he laid a tentative palm on her shoulder and shook. And then he felt wrong, because what if he was hurting her more? But when she didn't respond, he grew more frantic. He cut her wrists out of their bondage and winced at the sight of their mangled skin, cut through with red and splinters.

But nothing could prepare Bellamy for what he saw next. As Clarke pitched forward, he cushioned her body with his own and caught a glimpse of what had been done. What he saw made him want to retch. What he saw went beyond merely being squeamish. What he saw was agony, spelled out plain and clear on what had once been the skin of Clarke's back. Cords of raised flesh, bloodied and bruised in a disgusting array of purples and blacks, littered her back, her shirt lacerated into tatters that barely concealed anything. Thick rivulets of crimson streamed from her wounds, tumbling into one another and painting anything left undamaged in a sick sheen of blood.

Bellamy tried to tamp down his rising horror, balling the material of what remained of her shirt in his fists, lip curling up in a new bout of fury. But all he could picture was this Clarke juxtaposed next to the one who had told him he wasn't a killer, who had defended him in front of Jaha, who had fired a rifle and beamed at him afterwards. Formidable Clarke. Trusting Clarke. The Brave Princess.

He lowered her to the floor, propped her on her side, cradled her cheeks with shaking hands (they almost enveloped her entire face, had she always been this tiny?). "Clarke. Clarke! Can you hear me? Please say you can hear me…" When she didn't answer, he traced a trembling line over the bruise on her chin, feeling about as rubbed raw and vulnerable as he had ever felt before. He just wasn't equipped to deal with anything remotely like this, overcome with guilt and self-loathing as he was. "I can't do this without you…"

He hung his head and ground his knuckles into the dirt, and then all of a sudden, Clarke was moving, gasping for air and very nearly convulsing. Her eyelids fluttered open, and all at once, she was flailing away from him and then reeling forward as the mass of ruined skin on her back hit her full force. Her pupils twitched back and forth, rapidly adjusting and dilating in the cellar's dim light, and her hand clamped around his wrist like a vice.

"I- where?" Her gaze finally settled on Bellamy and colored with recognition. She sucked in a breath as her mouth curved into a trembling O. "A-are… you hurt?"

"What? Am I-?" He lifted his fingers to his temple, and they came away red. "I'm fine. This isn't only mine, it's-" He hesitated. _Scarier with our face paint, maybe you will too._ "It doesn't matter. Clarke… god, I'm sorry, I couldn't stop them. I tried, but I couldn't-"

She shuddered as another wave of pain ripped through her, but she tightened her grip on his arm in spite of herself. "Bellamy… not… your fault." God, she was comforting him. She was comforting him, and he was just sitting there like a selfish asshole, accepting it when she was bleeding out on the floor and whimpering and shaking and in so much pain she couldn't even see straight. It was all too much.

"Stop worrying about me!" he yelled, wincing when she flinched back. "Clarke, it's bad. You've lost a lot of blood and I'm not a medic like you. I'm just some guy and I've never dressed a wound like this before and we don't have anything-"

"… camp… now…" she murmured, cutting him off. "… supplies…"

Even semi-conscious, she was more alert than he was (as she always had been, hadn't she?), and Bellamy felt ridiculously grateful that she was still aware enough to order him around. He was no dashing hero, medical genius, survivalist extraordinaire, but he would make sure this exasperating, infuriating girl came out of this in one piece if it killed him. And if he couldn't keep calm in the process, he sure as hell had to keep strong. He made a deliberate effort to shove aside his guilt, his anger—he'd deal with those later—and braced her against his side, shrugging his jacket over her shoulders. He gently lifted her onto his back, trying to not cringe and jostle her further when she moaned and feebly dug her nails into his chest.

He swallowed the stutter in his throat and moved his feet forward, one after another: left, right, left, right. "Clarke, I'm going to take us back to camp now, but you have to stay awake no matter what. No passing out on me because I am not above dropping you in that Loch Ness-infested river Octavia was telling me about. Or doodling a monocle or some handlebars on your face; it'd go nicely with that shiny, new bruise of yours I think."

He tried to ignore the silent tears he felt slinking down his neck, the blood wetting his shirt. Only adrenaline carried him up the stairs and out into the forest, the sunset backlighting the trees in shades of red and violet that seemed to mock him, made him want to turn away and bury his face in his hands. But, instead, he pressed on, stumbling in the direction his gut told him was home.

"If you don't pull through this, I don't know who's going to nag me and Spacewalker all the time. And you still need to face your mother. You can't expect just me to face my demons; that's not fair. When we get back and you're feeling better, I'm going to lock you in the Comms Tent until you two work things out, okay? So you need to get through this… okay?"

He was babbling, but Clarke was breathing softly into his ear, mumbling an occasional assent, and for now, he was hopeful. And that was enough.

* * *

_**{fin.}**_


End file.
